


The Mechanic

by lokilickedme



Series: Chemical Prehistories [5]
Category: Chris Hemsworth - Fandom, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: Adult Content, Adult Themes, Angst, Bonding, Bromance, Brother Feels, Brotherly Bonding, Chem!Tom - Freeform, Deep feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Language (mild), Love, M/M, Male Bonding, Male/Male, Mention of abuse, Mentions of neglect, Non-Explicit Sex, Sexual Violence, Slash, Underage Sex, Violence, consensual underage sex between two minors, mention of illegal activities, mention of underage prostitution, mommy feels, mutual care, trading sexual favors to stay alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 18:17:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6340117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokilickedme/pseuds/lokilickedme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom and Chris forged a deep bond when they were kids, one that lasted the rest of their lives - but it wasn't always an easy road to friendship and mutual trust.  Told by Chris, this story outlines the early years of Tom's life after his arrival in San Diego and answers the question that's been asked so many times in Chemical - just HOW CLOSE were they?</p><p>There are several events referred to in this story that are detailed in Penumbraluna, which is the Chemical history that these prehistories are all related to.  If you haven't read Penumbraluna, some of the events alluded to here won't make sense to you (so I recommend reading that one first, the chapters are short).  And of course they all link back to Chemical, the story that started all this mess :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mechanic

 

 

Until I'm so old I forget my own name, I will never forget the first time I laid eyes on the kid that became my brother.  There was no doubt in those first few seconds of eye contact that he was not only willing to kill me, but that he could damn well do it in several different ways without even really having to get close to me.  You know that scene in The Crow where you first see his face, he looks up real slow and his eyes are blacked and it's like a demon branding its symbol on your soul for later collection?  Yeah, it was like that.  I got chills, I was half again his size but I damn near turned around and ran out of that place, and probably would have if I hadn't had to stop and duck a flying blade on a direct trajectory for my left eye socket.

He was a murderous little shit.

And I had invaded his territory.  Unannounced, unwelcome, and totally by accident.

I think the only reason he didn't kill me was because I turned around and he could see that I wasn't going to do anything.  Hands up like the cops just arrived, that was me.  I hadn't expected to find anyone living there, it was an honest accident that I even ended up standing there, staring him in the eyes and trying to remember what you were supposed to do when you cross paths with a rabid dog.  Look directly at it, or avert your eyes so it knows you're acknowledging and respecting its territorial claim?  I honestly couldn't recall, so I stood there like a deer in the headlights, waiting to see if he was going to pull out that second knife I could see bulging in his pocket or let me walk away.

In the end he just stared back at me, never blinking, that look of cold blooded willingness to kill darkening what should have been the sweet face of a young kid.  What I could see of it, anyway...he had all this long black hair and it covered one eye, hanging down well past his shoulders.  The only kids I knew with hair that long were hippies and stoners, but he didn't look like them - he looked like he was meant to be that way, not like he was rebelling against anything or making a fashion statement.  But he was dirty and worn out looking, like he was tired beyond what his body could take, and after a while of staring him down I realized he was shaking.   _Really_ shaking, not like he was scared...more like he was sick, that trembling shake that people get when they're on their last legs.

Turned out he _was_ sick, and very very hungry.

"If you want me to suck your cock, you're going to have to feed me first," he said in a surprisingly accented voice, much deeper than the age I'd guessed him for.  His face shifted from conscienceless killer to bitter and jaded faster than I could register the change.  When I said no, that expression morphed even faster into something like heartsick acceptance, and he took his eyes off me for the first time to look down as he started to unbuckle his jeans.

 _Holy shit,_ was all I could put together in my head. _This kid's been through it._

"No wait, I don't want that either."  I backed up, even though I was already on the far side of the room from him, giving him all the space I could without actually leaving.  I didn't want this poor guy feeling threatened by me, but something wouldn't let me walk out.  He'd snarled convincingly enough to keep me away from him and even though he didn't look the least bit scared of me, I just kept thinking back to that documentary I'd seen about wild dogs and wolves, and how they could trot right up to you and look like they're going to be peaceful, then take your hand off at the wrist when you reach out to pet them.

Something told me this guy could do more than just take my hand off.

 

For some reason, he trusted me.  I've never really known why and he's never said, so I just take it and don't question it.  Tommy's trust has become one of the things I treasure most in life, and it's something I would never risk, not for anything.  I know I'm on a short list and it's a privilege to be there.

I invited him to come home with me, and to my surprise, he followed me when I left - trailing along behind at a safe distance like a skittish dog, half wild and starved, beaten and kicked but willing to let you prove you weren't lying when you said you had food.

An inauspicious beginning to a friendship that neither of us ever expected. 

 

He ended up living with us for about three years, till he was almost eighteen.  He shared my room with me, which started out as a tense situation, since he was completely averse to being touched and tended to sleep with one eye open.  It was obvious there were a lot of demons that came out in the dark for him, but he recognized real fast that I was no threat and I wouldn't let anything happen to him as long as he was with me.  So he started to trust me a little at a time, just sort of inching closer both figuratively and, finally, literally.

He needed touch, my mom and I figured that out real quick.  He either hadn't been touched enough or he'd been touched the wrong way too much, but we didn't know which it was, so we moved slow until he stopped backing away from us.  It took a while and a lot of false starts, but eventually the growling stopped and he quit lashing out in angry panic any time we got too close.  I couldn't tell you how many bloody noses and cracked skulls I took from that kid, I could make a guess but it probably wouldn't even come close to the truth of it.  He was violent and if you spooked him, he lost it, and it didn't stop until there was enough blood to calm him down.  Something about seeing his fists covered in red, whether it was my blood or his own, seemed to break whatever came over him.  Fortunately I'm an easy bleeder, one punch to the nose and I'm spurting.

I fought back sometimes if he made me angry enough, but mostly I let him take his whacks out on me until he felt better.  I'm big, but he was way stronger than he looked, and tough as hell.  When I did fight back, he was hard to take down, and I never walked away without something to show that I'd been in it with him.  For a skinny sick kid, he was scary powerful.  The sad thing was that it probably came from the scars he was covered in - because what else is a scar but proof of something you've survived?  The guy was a survivor, that was for fucking sure.

We never found out what was wrong with him, but he coughed like his lungs were full of ash.  Sometimes he couldn't breathe, mostly at night, and I woke up I don't know how many times to find him gasping like he was suffocating.  A few whacks on the back sometimes cleared him up, sometimes it didn't.  Some nights I shoved him into the hot shower so the steam could open him up, but that didn't always work either.  Sometimes there was nothing to do but wait it out, and when it was over he was shaking and weak with blue lips and glassy eyes, looking like he'd just been snatched back from death but still had one foot in hades.  He would look at me with those huge soulful eyes and there was so much in them, I couldn't read it all.  Just _thank you, I'm sorry,_ and several variations of _fucking hell._

 

I was with him when he found his sister, after dragging his fifteen year old ass all the way from Detroit to San Diego with plans to murder her foster dad for whatever it was he was doing to her.  I never asked, but I could guess.  I knew the family's oldest boy from school and he was that sort of sarcastic, mean natured asshole that you knew was just venting his frustration on the world because his home life sucked. So when the dad ended up dead in the dirt after an altercation that set off a series of unfortunate events, I tampered with the scene just enough to make things come out the way they needed to.  Tommy was hurt and couldn't do it himself, I knew he was depending on me.  And when it came down to it, the police patted us both on the back, offered trauma counseling if we wanted it, and sent us home without looking at us twice.

To this day I don't know if he killed that guy.  Emma was holding a bloody knife, but the only stab wound I could see was in Tommy's side.  There was so much broken glass scattered all over the two of them that it all could have been accidental, but that one gash was going to draw some attention, and when Tommy told me to make it look like an accident I held my breath and did it.  I'm thirty two years old now and I still haven't ever experienced anything to even remotely come close to the creepy feeling of shoving a five inch dagger of broken glass into my best friend's side.  And the kid didn't make a sound when I did it. When the cops arrived he had this chunk of glass sticking out of the gash above his hip and nobody ever thought for a second that it hadn't happened when he fell through the window.  There was no evidence to the contrary.  Or more to the point, the evidence to the contrary was stuffed down the back of my pants, and nobody had any reason to look there.

I got rid of the knife a couple of days later, sunk it in the bay.  I don't know if Mrs Lensher ever noticed one of her kitchen utensils was missing, but if she did, I doubt she ever made the connection.

Emma went into a care facility and Tommy lost contact with her again.  It was like starting over with him for a few weeks, all the feral anger and violent rage settling back into his bones again, triggered by the frustration of having come so far to find her only to watch her be taken away in the back of a squad car.  It was for the best though, at least that was how I saw it...because I'd seen that look in her eyes when I took the knife from her hand, that empty, blank, nobody's-home stare that said she'd already vacated the premises and wasn't coming back.  Somewhere in between our arrival and the crashing of the glass, she left to someplace happier, some place where none of it happened.  I almost envied her, for Tommy's sake - because he was going to have to live with it all, both his part of it and hers.

 

He'd lived with us for a while before he finally crossed that imaginary line down the center of the bed, the barrier he'd put up between us from the very first day he walked into my house.  I'd never really respected it that much - it was _my_ bed and if I wanted to sprawl out, I would, and there was nothing he could do about it if I shoved my leg across his side of the mattress.  He'd shove it back sometimes, sometimes not.  It was probably two months before he stopped snarling _Stay on your side_ every time he crawled in, and I laughed every time just to remind him whose house - and bed - he was in.  But eventually we started referring to everything as _his_  instead of ours, and at some point my mom and I started belonging to him too.  He sort of took over our lives that way, without trying, and I'm sure without meaning to.  We just wanted him to have everything that normal people had, and that included other people, people who cared about him and who didn't hurt him.  The angry little cur had grown on us and we'd fallen in love with him.  So we gave him _us._

But there were still hot tempered outbursts as his nerves recalibrated to the unfamiliarity of 'normal' life, and one day in a flash of rage that ended with us on the floor with our hands around each other's throats, he whispered two words that I'd never heard from him without a third.  He'd said _Don't touch me_ so many times that when I heard _Touch me_ it didn't really register that he'd said it.  I thought I just hadn't heard the _Don't._

But when I did what he asked, and he didn't explode into a cursing inferno or stab me, I knew right away that I needed to give him whatever he asked for next.  Because Tommy never asked for anything, ever.

 

What happened between us is hard to explain.  It's not denial or shame that makes me describe it this way, but I've never had any latent attraction or desire toward another guy before, and I felt like he probably hadn't either despite what I knew he did to stay alive on the road.  I knew he'd sold himself to get here, he did what he had to do and I never believed for one second that he actually wanted to do any of it.  I also knew he'd had to trade himself for food after he got here, living in that condemned apartment building with the junkies and homeless folks.  I also knew something else that I've never to this day told him I was aware of - that he'd had to let a pusher who went by the name of Slade use him however he wanted in exchange for that crumbling room I'd found him in.  Slade was the kind of vicious bad news you always hope you'll never meet up with, dark alley or bright light of day, he was just as bad either way.  He sold drugs to one of the mechanics I worked with after school and he hung around the garage a lot, bragging about this or that, until one day he bragged about his pretty black haired boy and how this kid could take all the rough he could hand out, snarling and biting just the way he liked it.   _Best piece of ass I've ever had, face of an angel, cock like a racehorse, attitude of a rabid wolverine_ he said, grinning like the sick fuck that he was.  I figured out he was talking about Tommy, and suddenly the memory of his blood stained blue jeans on the bathroom floor that first day made me lose my shit.  I waited until he left, then clocked out and followed him.

Tommy's never gonna know what I did for him that day.  That's how I want it.  Eventually he stopped looking over his shoulder every time we left the house, and that was enough repayment for me.

So when he looked up at me with those huge blue eyes and said _Please_...I knew what he needed.  There are different levels of touch, each of them reaching closer to our souls, and he desperately needed me to change something that had been rough and brutal and painful into something he could feel better about.  Something he didn't have to be ashamed of anymore because of the lack of love it had involved.  He was numb in his heart from doing what it took to survive and he wanted to _feel_ again.

He wasn't gay and neither was I, but I feel happy when I remember that I told him I loved him, when I felt his bony knees clutch into my sides and he let me take him.  I'd been with one girl a few times so I knew the general mechanics of it, but Tommy silently showed me what to do, and we did it.  But it wasn't just sex.  I don't really think of it as sex at all, even to this day.  I mean, yeah, technically speaking it was sex - but to Tommy I think it was a comfort thing, because he held onto me so tight I thought at first I must be hurting him.  But he clung to me like that long after it was over, and I just held him and rubbed his back and told him it was okay, and he nodded against my neck like he truly believed me.

I couldn't really tell you what it was to me.  It meant so many things - me proving to him that he could trust me, him awarding me that trust, the forming of a bond that wasn't about physical touch.  All I know is that nothing was ever the same after that.  He never shied away from me again, never looked away when I looked at him, never pulled away when I touched him.  For the first time since I'd met him, he relaxed. The tense, tightly wound nervousness was gone and it never came back, even when he was stressed.  To this day, fifteen years later, I can walk up behind him and he'll lean back against me, it doesn't matter where we are or who's looking, he doesn't care.  He sees me as the first source of comfort that he was ever able to accept outside of his own sister, and being in contact with me never fails to bring a little smile of contentment to his face.  And I don't care who's looking either - if he leans back on me, I'll put my arms around him and hold him.

 

Over the next three years our relationship was sort of indefinable.  We were close, _really_ close, so much so that when we told people we were brothers they didn't doubt it for a second even though we were polar opposites in looks.  He took a growth spurt and shot up way over six feet, ending up a couple of inches taller than me even though I was two years older.  He was thin and wiry and I was thick and bulky; he had all that long jet black hair and I was blond like my mom.  Even people who'd known me my whole life and _knew_ I didn't have a brother seemed to forget that he hadn't always been part of our family, and that was okay with us - he finally had some people of his own, and he belonged to us and we belonged to him.

Aside from the brother thing, he became my best friend, the guy I'd go to for the rest of my life for everything from five bucks to emotional support to advice about girls.  We understood each other and before long we could talk without talking.  I was the only person who didn't question his quirks or ask for explanations when he did something weird - which was pretty often, now that I think back on it.  After I found out he had indian blood his attachments to nature and the moon and the sky all made more sense, but I'd accepted them long before that, just figuring it was part of who he was and it wasn't my job to wonder what the hell it was about.  It was my job to accept him however he was and make sure he knew that it was cool, no matter what.

Mostly that was how it was between us.  But even after he'd tamed down and had his temper and emotional outbursts under control, there were still times when he lost it and everything crashed down on him again.  Sometimes it was like starting all over at the beginning, sweet talking him out of the closet with spaghetti, sitting outside the door talking to him all night when the spaghetti didn't work, making sure he knew we loved him and everything would be okay.  And then sometimes he would come out but his eyes would stay haunted for days, full of secrets he never told me, soul murdering memories that poured down his face as tears even though he never cried.  Most of the time he never made a sound.  Sometimes I thought he was dead inside that closet, but I was too scared to open the door and find out.

It was during those times that he would cross that imaginary line down the center of the bed and slowly creep over to my side, just a tentative touch at first, usually his mouth just barely pressing into my shoulder, so lightly that all I really felt was his breath on my skin.  I never touched him until he was ready for me to, and he let me know in his own way when it was time.  Sometimes he would just lay next to me for a while and then eventually move back over to his own side, sighing with a contentment that he'd somehow gotten just from me letting him be close.  Other times I'd listen to his breathing in the dark and hear that raspy catch to it, the sound that always told me he was suffering inside, and I would turn onto my side facing him and wait until he scooted up against me.  After a while he would turn his face up to me and I would lay my hand against his cheek, and he would push against it like a dog that wants to be petted some more.  If he did that, I knew it was okay to kiss him.

We always kissed when we did it.  Always.  I never took him without kissing him first, it was important and I knew he needed it.  He couldn't be okay with any of it without being kissed first, to let him know there was feeling involved in what we were doing, that there was an emotional bond and that I cared for him, I wasn't using him.  His body was his, even when he was sharing it with me.

Something in him brought out my dominant nature and I always took control - it was never about who was boss, it was about who needed to be taken care of and who was capable of providing that care.  It always struck me as strange how submissive he was to me in bed, because outside of it he was the most dominant in-control person I've ever known.  The guy who always knows what needs to be done and gets busy doing it before anyone else even realizes there's a need.  The kid was an alpha male if I've ever seen one, but when we were alone he handed all territorial rights over to me for some reason that I've never understood.  I knew it wasn't his true nature to be the bottom in a sexual relationship.  But with me he was.  To make sure he was okay with it, I tried once or twice to let him take control, but he didn't want it.

So I did what he needed me to do.

 

The first summer that he was with us, girls started noticing him.  He didn't catch on at first until I pointed it out to him, then he started paying attention.  It was easy for him, snagging a girl, and by the end of that summer he'd blazed a trail through more happily willing young females than I've been with in my entire life.  It was like an affirmation for him, letting a girl take him by the hand and lead him off somewhere to screw against a wall or in the back seat of her car, or to climb in the back window of her house after her folks went to bed.  The boy saw some serious action during his sixteenth year.  And all the girls, to the last one, came away smiling and satisfied.  He treated them good, he didn't take advantage of them and he never _ever_ abused any of them.  Which, honestly, was a surprise to me - with his past being as full of abuse as it was, I didn't figure he would even know how to be with a girl without being rough or mean to her.

And then I realized.  Those times he and I were together, he'd been learning.  He'd been paying attention.  He was the bottom, the submissive, and he was watching how I treated him from underneath me.  So for the rest of the summer, every time a girl grinned at me as she straightened her skirt or smoothed her hair after coming back from wherever they'd snuck off to, I would nod and say _You're welcome._  They always gave me a weird look, but I didn't feel any need to explain.

I was proud to know I'd given him something he could use in life.

 

His relationship with my mom was more straightforward and simple.  She started treating him like her own kid from the first day I brought him home, and it didn't take long for him to develop a fierce protectiveness over her.  He was never a guest, never a visitor - in her head he was always going to stay, and that was that.  If he hadn't, I know it would have broken her heart.  She adored him and took it upon herself to fix him, to repair whatever damage had been done to him by everybody in his life up till that moment.  There was going to be no more of that, and that was final.

The one time he tried to sneak out in the middle of the night, a couple of days after first coming home with me, I caught him stealing just one thing from my house.  A picture of my mom.  I followed him out and knocked him down in the dirt, asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, if he knew that she would cry for days over him when she found him gone.  He just stared at me with an uncomprehending look that told me he had no concept of someone being sad over him.  It was all that kept me from beating his ass that night.  Instead, I turned around and walked back into the house and went back to bed.  It was a few minutes, but eventually he crawled into bed next to me and whispered _Sorry._

He never tried to leave again.

My mom's attachment to him never bothered me, even when she treated him like he was the one she was proudest of.  I knew it was for his benefit, that he needed something to feel good about himself for, so I never begrudged it of him.  From what I could gather, his own mom never paid him any attention, so suddenly having this new mom who hugged him and talked to him like a human being with feelings, it was heaven to him.  He went from a surly animal to a nice, polite, good mannered kid in the space of just a couple of weeks, and he started responding to her affection with an eager affection of his own.  I was a little bit worried at first when he started sneaking into her bed some nights, but after a few times listening outside the door, it became obvious there was nothing going on that shouldn't be.  It was the cuddling he was after, and mom was more than happy to give him all he could handle.  Even a year later, when he was so tall his feet hung off the end of the bed, he was still tiptoing into her room and curling up next to her so she could stroke his hair and talk to him till he fell asleep.

 

He'd dropped out of school when he ran away from his last foster home, so to fill his days while I was at classes, he read.  He read everything, and he taught himself everything he could learn from books.  Useful stuff, non-useful stuff, he didn't care, he read it all.  If something caught his interest he would learn every detail of it till you could ask him any random question and he'd know the answer.  I always wondered if maybe he wasn't a little bit of a genius, but he shrugged it off and said he just had some common sense, and that people often mistake that for smarts.  But the guy was brilliant, whether he'd ever admit it or not.

He was drawn to mythology and read everything he could get his hands on about all the different legends of the world until the Norse stuff caught his attention.  He liked the fables about the wolf god, probably because wolves were his thing - my mom had encouraged him to study them when she saw him watching documentaries on the wildlife channel, and that was sort of when things changed for him.  He'd found something he could relate to, something that made him feel attached to this world, like maybe he was born into the wrong species but it was okay because he finally knew where he fit in.  It became something of an obsession for him, but we encouraged it because it made him genuinely happy.

He told me when he was seventeen that he wanted a tattoo.  Nobody could legally ink him because he was too young, so I had our buddy Ewan get me some gear and I did it myself, while Tom read to me out of a book how to do it.  It turned out cool, and over the next few years that tattoo of the wolf from the myth turned into an entire legend that went from his ankle to his hip.  He still comes over every now and then and shows me pages from this ancient old book that he never took back to the library, and I draw whatever he wants onto his skin, some new bit of the story that fits with whatever part of his life he's in.  It all means something to him, and every time he adds to it, he seems a little bit happier, more content with his life...almost like the pictures I'm inking onto him _are_ his life, and it's all making more sense with each new bit, working toward some twisted sort of happy ending that he already knows is coming even though it hasn't made its way into the book yet.  Something tells me by the time we get to that chapter, there'll be very little empty space left on his body.

 

He moved out when he was eighteen, mainly so that he could help this girl whose ex was after her.  She needed a safe place to stay, so he got an apartment and moved her into it with him.  She wasn't his girlfriend and he didn't owe her anything, she was just someone who needed help that he felt he was able to give.  My mom hated to see him go, but she was so proud of him for helping this girl that she didn't even try to get him to stay.

 _He's found his way,_ she told me after he was gone.   _He's chosen which path he's going to walk, and it's the right one._

She didn't say it, but I knew from her teary smile that what she really was saying was _We succeeded._

When mom died a year later, Tommy about lost his mind.  He didn't go to the funeral, but he sat outside in the parking lot on the tailgate of my truck in a borrowed suit, reading the book about wolves that she'd bought him when he first came to us.  It was bookmarked with the picture of her that he'd tried to steal the night I caught him sneaking out.  After everything was over and everybody left, I came out with the little urn of her ashes and he just stared at it, all these shiny tears in his eyes that never fell, and we sat there for a while without saying anything.  We smoked a cigarette together, then I took him home and he cooked me some spaghetti on mom's stove and we ate in silence with her ashes in the middle of the table between us.

That was the last time we both slept in my bed.  He was nineteen, I was about to turn twenty one.  But it felt like we were kids again, him fifteen and me seventeen, that first beautiful summer when he came out of his shell and the world started to make a little bit more sense to us both.

 

And now that crazy runt is nearly thirty and owns his own pub.  I work for him sometimes, when I feel like it or he needs me, which is pretty much full time these days since his place is so popular.  He's married to a pretty little redhead that he's been nuts about since he was twenty one, and their first baby is due in a couple of months.  I got back together with my first love, the little blonde deaf girl that lived up the street from me, the one I was moping over when I met Tom...she'd moved away and something was missing from my life because of it, but Tommy slid right into that empty spot and never stopped bugging me to get back in touch with her until the day she moved back into town, ten years later.  He got me a book on sign language and forced me to read it, sitting up late with me at the pub after he'd locked up, practicing the signs with me over and over until I finally learned enough to talk to her a little.  She read lips, but when I told him that was good enough, he scowled at me and smacked me in the head with the book. _No it's not - learn it!_  he growled.  And he was right.  The first time I signed _hello baby_   to her, she was mine again.

He always did have more common sense than me.

 

A freaky twist of fate keeps him tied to his past but somehow managed to change the whole miserable thing into something good - a teenage daughter that found him a year ago, the result of the same cross-country trek that gave him those nightmares he used to have every night.  It put a nice shiny polish on what used to be a jagged edged blade stuck in his back.  Now it's in his pocket and the hole it left has healed.  And now he's patching things up with his dad and learning a little bit about why things went the way they did.  It's the closure he needed, another bit of his past that he can put away.

In the midst of all this, it's never once been unclear where I fit in with him.  I stand in the background a lot, keeping an eye on him, stepping up whenever it looks like he might not have something completely under control.  That's not often, but he knows that all he has to do is turn around and I'll be behind him.  I love that kid, and it makes me laugh at myself but every now and then I get a little twinge of jealousy when I see how happy he is with Anja.  But like my mom always said, he wasn't some cute little pet we could keep forever.  He was a wild injured animal that we nursed back to health, and when the time came, we had to let him go back to the wild.  He might have gotten tame enough to trust us, but his ears were always laid back, listening for a howl from the hills, telling him it was time to go.

He probably should have never gotten to grow up.  He probably should have died a long time ago, the victim of whatever abuses he managed somehow to survive.  He shouldn't have had to live through all that and if anyone deserved a mercy killing to keep it all from happening, it was him.  But then I wouldn't have met my best friend, my brother, the guy who's stuck by me for half my life, and Anja wouldn't be that glowing little beacon of happiness that she turned into when she finally opened her eyes and saw him waiting patiently for her.  Cara wouldn't exist, and the world would be a darker place for that, for sure.  My mom wouldn't have had a stray to care for in her final years, watching with pride as he went from the snarling rabid dog that followed me home to the cuddly sweet puppy that curled up next to her on her bed when she came home from work.

I wouldn't have learned how to take care of another person.  Not just their physical needs - that's easy enough, you feed someone and keep them warm and that's pretty much all there is to that.  But to nurture someone's soul, that's a whole different ballgame.  When Tommy came into my life I learned by sheer necessity how to care for a human being's emotional needs.  It's harder than it sounds...especially if they're fighting you every step of the way.  But once he calmed down and stopped biting long enough for us to pet him, his eyes told us what he needed even though his words never did.  It was in how he reacted, how he responded.

He's still like that, mostly.  You just have to look in his eyes to see all the things he's not saying.  But if you look deep enough, he's saying a lot. 

 

 


End file.
